ArchitorSpace by Daniel Mirer

Gallery Vassie is extremely proud to present ‘ArchitorSpace’, a monumental and colourful look at modern architecture, by the noted American, Amsterdam-based photographer Daniel Mirer. Taken between 2001 & 2009, ArchitorSpace pays homage to the grandeur of architecture.

The photographs in this exhibition are a lavish display of architectural images, which are sensitive and intelligent observations of the world that they document. The photographer assumes a role of tremendous responsibility in reporting literally as a communicator. The insight, skills, of the person with the camera can become the vehical of communication to a vast number of people, through various media outlets. The image can be seen by literally millions of people, when by contrast, only a minority of people will know the subject first hand.

It could be argued that today architectural photographs are used more as communication tools rather than being viewed as objects of art. With more advanced technologies and more accessability to equipment, it takes special skills for a photographer to offer a different viewpoint to approach a subject from a refreshing angle and so offer us something that we wouldn’t see. Mirer has this uncanny ability to chose the right shot and appoint the best view effortlessly, in the most banal of familiar environments.

In this series, he makes photographs that reproduce other peoples work (work of an architect) uncomplicatedly yet with his penetrating eye, that brings these eeiry and people-less spaces to life.
The “ArchitorSpace” photographs display Mirer’s specific interest in his actual fear of enclosed areas and the banality of spaces within architecture.
These places are typologies of contemporary post-industrial architectural aesthetic, which makes the individual appear displaced.
His photographic strategy is to purposefully make these images heavy with absence; these forgotten deserted (non-sites) are environments that are entirely familiar, revealing no history or functionality, but yet are commonplace.
Mirer photographs these interiors and out of sight exteriors from a direct frontal view point, at sufficient distance to include the entire space creating a flat and melancholic state. The sites show where the individual vanishes in the glare of fluorescent light or scale of open facades.
These are architectural portraits that become a matter-of-fact, which demonstrates a primary function of the still photographic image, to record a temporal space.
The photographs are of spaces in which a building facade, alley or a corridor is virtually indistinguishable from another; here repetition and redundancy collapse into an architectural singularity. Within the images, the subjects who otherwise occupy these spaces are engulfed into the void of here-could-be-anywhere, into the monumental dissolution of space in contemporary architecture.